Implicit regularization of deep residual networks towards neural ODEs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Marion, Pierre, Wu, Yu-Han, Sander, Michael E., Biau, Gérard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Marion, Pierre
Wu, Yu-Han
Sander, Michael E.
Biau, Gérard
author_facet Marion, Pierre
Wu, Yu-Han
Sander, Michael E.
Biau, Gérard
contents Residual neural networks are state-of-the-art deep learning models. Their continuous-depth analog, neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), are also widely used. Despite their success, the link between the discrete and continuous models still lacks a solid mathematical foundation. In this article, we take a step in this direction by establishing an implicit regularization of deep residual networks towards neural ODEs, for nonlinear networks trained with gradient flow. We prove that if the network is initialized as a discretization of a neural ODE, then such a discretization holds throughout training. Our results are valid for a finite training time, and also as the training time tends to infinity provided that the network satisfies a Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition. Importantly, this condition holds for a family of residual networks where the residuals are two-layer perceptrons with an overparameterization in width that is only linear, and implies the convergence of gradient flow to a global minimum. Numerical experiments illustrate our results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_01213
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Implicit regularization of deep residual networks towards neural ODEs
Marion, Pierre
Wu, Yu-Han
Sander, Michael E.
Biau, Gérard
Machine Learning
Residual neural networks are state-of-the-art deep learning models. Their continuous-depth analog, neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), are also widely used. Despite their success, the link between the discrete and continuous models still lacks a solid mathematical foundation. In this article, we take a step in this direction by establishing an implicit regularization of deep residual networks towards neural ODEs, for nonlinear networks trained with gradient flow. We prove that if the network is initialized as a discretization of a neural ODE, then such a discretization holds throughout training. Our results are valid for a finite training time, and also as the training time tends to infinity provided that the network satisfies a Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition. Importantly, this condition holds for a family of residual networks where the residuals are two-layer perceptrons with an overparameterization in width that is only linear, and implies the convergence of gradient flow to a global minimum. Numerical experiments illustrate our results.
title Implicit regularization of deep residual networks towards neural ODEs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01213